


how does it know how to stop being milk?

by falseari



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Diego Hargreeves is Bad at Feelings, Lila Pitts is Arguably Worse at Feelings - Freeform, also some asylum scenes, we love them both anyway - Freeform, yogurt scene but lila pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-21
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:01:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26574169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falseari/pseuds/falseari
Summary: Commission orders are very simple. When the timeline is threatened, you fix it in one of two ways:1. Protect someone2. Kill someoneThere’s no third option. You don’t give someone a flat tire, or slide them a winning lottery ticket, or give the police an anonymous tip. You put a bullet between a pair of eyes, and you add to the world’s never ending list of cold cases.Lila doesn’t know why that’s how it works, but it is. When you grow up in the Commission, you learn pretty quickly not to ask questions.Or: The yogurt scene, from Lila's point of view.
Relationships: Diego Hargreeves/Lila Pitts
Comments: 20
Kudos: 62
Collections: diego+lila=endgame no i dont take critisism





	how does it know how to stop being milk?

**Author's Note:**

> lila does not know that her ultimate goal is to protect five until episode 4 when she meets with the handler, so i simply have to assume that she has a little bit of an internal conflict before then because otherwise i have a very hard time explaining why she decides to go cry in elliott's darkroom. anyway i love lila and there's not enough fics with her so i hope you enjoy!! (credit for all dialogue from the yogurt scene goes to the umbrella academy writers)

Commission orders are very simple. When the timeline is threatened, you fix it in one of two ways: 

1\. Protect someone 

2\. Kill someone 

The vast majority of the time, it’s cheaper, easier, and cleaner to go with option two. Dead people lack free will, and thus lack the proclivity for screwing up the timeline anyway after you’ve gone through all the trouble of saving their arse. Option one often results in even more bloodshed than a straightforward hit. The assigned assassins are expected to eliminate any and all threats to the subject until the temporal anomaly is avoided. 

There’s no third option. You don’t give someone a flat tire, or slide them a winning lottery ticket, or give the police an anonymous tip. You put a bullet between a pair of eyes, and you add to the world’s never ending list of cold cases. 

Lila doesn’t know why that’s how it works, but it is. When you grow up in the Commission, you learn pretty quickly not to ask questions. 

Sitting in Elliott’s cold, dimly lit apartment, vaguely listening to Diego and Five snap at each other over some grainy footage of a man holding an umbrella, Lila knows the other shoe is about to drop. 

She’s been on this mission for two months. _Gain Diego Hargreeves’ Trust._ An unusual, special assignment. No other context. An order from her mother, not the Commission heads. 

_Kill Diego Hargreeves_ would have made perfect sense. The man was running around Dallas, decades before his own birth, trying to save the not-yet-threatened life of a president. He must have tripped at least a dozen infinite switchboard alarms. 

He would’ve been an easy target, Lila thinks. She remembers the day she met him, after her mother had checked her into that asylum. He was still handcuffed from the cops that had brought him in, yelling incessantly about the plot to assassinate JFK. She egged him on a bit, just to see what he’d do. Enough to keep stirring his anger, but not enough to get herself into trouble. 

_“Might as well save your voice, love,” she offered, leaning casually against the wall of the main room. He paused his tirade, seemingly surprised she’d addressed him. Or maybe the accent had thrown him off._

_Lila added with a smirk, “Those bastards aren’t even listening to you.”_

_“No shit,” he agreed. “Because these fucking morons -” Diego raised his voice again, locking eyes with the guard near the door, “- wouldn’t know good advice if it stabbed them in the face!”_

_“I warned you, Hargreeves,” the guard muttered. He motioned to a nurse as Diego shot back a retort._

_Lila couldn’t help but laugh when her target’s tough-guy persona vanished at the sight of a needle. Stripped of projectiles and handcuffed, the famed, superpowered Diego Hargreeves was no match for one 5’2’’ nurse with a syringe full of tranquilizer._

_She could have killed him so easily. But those weren’t her orders._

Gain Diego Hargreeves’ trust. 

_Any time that wasn’t spent sleeping or in mandated therapy was spent with Diego. He became marginally less unhinged as the days passed, but Lila knew it was all a ruse. He’d still insist the president was in danger over cafeteria lunch (some days Lila played along, just to hear his enthusiasm over his plan to save him), and he was definitely devoting what little remained of his brain power to devising an escape plan._

_Getting Diego to let her hang around all the time was the easiest part of the entire thing. For someone who proclaimed himself a lone wolf as much as Diego did, he never put much effort into getting rid of her._

She leans back in one of Elliott's chairs, chewing her fingernail absently. She picked up that habit in the asylum, to play crazy more convincingly, and damn, has it stuck. Diego and Five are loudly discussing the umbrella man footage, and it’s clearly important, important enough to disrupt a timeline. 

Lila’s hourglass is running out of sand. She’s known that since those assassin triplets chased them out of the asylum, since Five blinked into the backseat of her stolen car. She knows it now, half-listening as the brothers shout something about their father. 

She’s going to have to kill someone, and soon. Her mother wanting Five’s head would make sense, though two months of using Diego to get to him seems a bit long winded. The Commission clearly wants Diego dead if they’re willing to pay three assassin’s salaries for it. Maybe she’s meant to tag along while Five and Diego inevitably gather all their time-hopping siblings, so she can take them all out in one neat go. 

Somehow, some way, she’s going to have to kill someone. She’s almost definitely going to have to kill Diego. 

Lila’s killed a lot of people. In fact, the two months she’s spent with Diego is the longest she’s gone without assassinating anyone since her mother started sending her on jobs. She could take out a group of emotionally-stunted wannabe superheroes without breaking a sweat. 

Especially Diego. Because now, if she attacked him, Diego would hesitate. 

She wouldn’t. Hesitate. 

Lila doesn’t think she would hesitate. 

The fingernail she’s chewing on tastes metallic. She wipes the blood off and switches to her thumb. 

Diego and his brother are hunched over a phonebook, looking for their father’s address. She should go with them. Her mother is sure to send new orders soon, now that Five’s back and they’re out of the loony bin. She should keep them close, in case she’s ordered to protect them. 

Kill them. 

Lila’s fine with either, she tells herself, wincing as she breaks skin again. 

Lila’s feet carry her towards Elliott’s darkroom on their own volition. Elliott, still tied to a chair, makes muffled sounds of protests. She flips him off, but does make sure to shut the door to the room as quickly as she opens it. 

The walls of the room mute Diego and Five’s voices. Lila shoves some photo equipment aside and climbs on the counter, hugging her knees to her chest like she had the night she’d bared her pretend heart to Diego. 

_“I see these people that no one else sees,” she’d whispered, perched at the foot of Diego’s bed. “They tell me to do terrible things, and sometimes I listen, so I got locked away.” The fake tears had come with surprising ease. Diego had these big, scared eyes. Not scared of her, not scared of the story. Scared of the tears rolling down Lila’s face. He'd tried to brush them away with his thumb, and she’d willed them to stop falling so he’d stop looking so damn hurt._

She should follow them. Do her bloody job. She can’t hear their voices anymore, and wonders if they’ve already left. Maybe they have. Maybe those blonde triplets will kill them both while they’re out. Diego will die without ever knowing she lied to him, and she’ll have completed her ludicrous mission of gaining Diego Hargreeves’ trust to the fullest extent possible. Her mother will compliment her on her work. Then she’ll send her off to kill another target, hopefully without insisting she play get-to-know-you with him for two months first, and the world will go on its merry fucking way. 

Lila could live with that. 

She’s sitting there, fidgeting with her hair in that way her mum hates, idly considering how the red light of the darkroom reminds her of blood, when the door to the hallway clicks open. 

“What are you doing in here?” Diego asks. 

The softness of his voice turns her stomach. 

“Nothing, just,” she swallows the lump in her throat she hadn’t realized was there. “You know, getting some air,” she rambles. She grits her teeth as she tries to think of a better lie. 

“In a closet?” 

“There’s a draft,” she fires back. 

Five’s waiting for him. She can tell by the way he’s hovering in the doorway, glancing back down the hall. Good, let him leave. He doesn’t even have to come back for all she cares. 

“Alright Lila, I gotta take off with Five, okay?” 

Her stomach feels funny when he says her name. It always does. Her mother had suggested she pick a fake name for her asylum character, but what was Diego going to do, look her up in a phone book? Besides, it meant one less lie for her to keep straight. 

“It’s happening again, isn’t it?” Lila blurts, before Diego can step into the hallway. 

“What is?” he asks, his wide eyes searching her’s. 

She spins her finger next to her temple. “Cuckoo,” she offers vaguely. 

He walks closer to her, his face still holding a question. Lila mutters something about the doomsday Diego and Five had been discussing, and nothing about the fact she, a seasoned killer, has suddenly decided to have qualms about killing someone. 

Diego just stands in front of her, painted in red light. 

“Diego, last time I started seeing things, they put me away.” She doesn’t try to hide the way her voice cracks. Lila, the slightly off the rails woman who sees things that aren’t there, has cried in front of Diego before. It helps sell the story. 

“Maybe I shouldn’t have left,” she adds, feeling tears well up in her eyes. _Maybe we shouldn’t have left._ But it wouldn’t have mattered, would it? She knows better than anyone that some things just have to happen. Que sera, sera, her mum always said. 

Lila feels her breathing quicken. She ignores the tear that carves down her cheek. 

“Stop,” Diego orders, locking his gaze with hers. He’d said the same thing back in the asylum, when she’d told him that sometimes she felt like she deserved to be locked up. 

_“They tell me it’s for a good reason,” she explained. She’d snuck into his room late that night. He’d been tranquilized earlier after a guard caught him with a crudely-fashioned shiv. She was sitting cross-legged on his floor when he’d woken up, hours before._

_“The shadow people I see, the bad things they tell me to do are always for a good reason,” she continued. Diego was sat on the floor across from her, his back against his bed. He didn’t say anything, but he met her eyes so she’d know he was listening._

_“And I believe them, so I do the things they tell me. But even if the reason is good, sometimes the things can still be bad, I think.” A choked sob broke forth, all for show, because Lila was good at following her orders._

_“I think I need to be locked up, Diego,” she told him, her voice hushed. “I think, maybe, I’m a bit of a bad person.”_

_“Stop,” he insisted, reaching out to still her hand, which was frantically twirling a piece of her hair. “You don’t believe that.”_

_She didn’t believe that, actually. So she wasn’t sure why the reassurance made her want to cry harder._

Diego lifts himself onto the darkroom’s counter, sitting down beside her. “Do you -” he pauses, picking out the right words. “Do you believe there are things in this universe we’re never meant to understand?” 

Lila bites her cheek to keep from gawking at the decidedly un-Diegolike question. Diego doesn’t talk about things he can't understand, or problems he can’t solve. Diego Hargreeves lands in an unfamiliar decade, separated from everyone he knows, and ignores the problem in favor of stopping the JFK assassination. He ignores the obvious temporal anomalies that such a plan would create, and focuses on his brilliant solution of cutting off Lee Harvey Oswald’s trigger finger. 

Vulnerable Diego is just a little more than she can deal with in her current state, so Lila deflects. “Well, I failed remedial school. Most things I don’t understand.” 

“Okay-” 

“Like yogurt,” she continues, picking the word mostly because she knows he likes to make fun of how she says it. “How does it know how to stop being milk?” 

“Okay. Like yogurt,” he agrees, not even mentioning her pronunciation. Diego’s looking at her like he’s afraid she might shatter. 

No one has ever looked at her like this. 

Diego continues, weaving her dumb interjection into his original point. “We don’t have to understand shit about it for it to be real. Right? Doesn’t make us crazy.” 

Us. Lila lost the ability to feel queasy countless kills ago, but she thinks if she still had it, it might make an appearance now. 

“That home movie? It’s just that,” he reassures her. His thumb brushes her tearstained cheek and some part of her wants to break his hand but a different part wants to hold it there a little longer. “It’s like yogurt.” 

“Pinky swear?” she asks, just like she always did when they were locked up together. 

“The pinkiest,” he responds, and he always says it sarcastically, but something in his voice this time round sounds close to genuine. 

Their pinkies hook and unhook. Diego pats her knee as he slides off the counter, satisfied that her tears have stopped falling. 

“I gotta leave you here with Elliott, okay?” 

“Why?” she asks, because tailing him will be easier than insisting she go along. 

“Got a family thing,” he answers, all purposefully mysterious. As if she hadn’t just heard him and Five decide to go track down their father. 

She does follow them, in the end. Because really, there aren’t very many viable pneumatic tube locations on the way, which means no one can order her not to protect Diego Hargreeves. 

Protect him, she does. Saves his arse from literally dying of daddy issues.

**Author's Note:**

> how does one write an ending


End file.
